Every sensitive reader has pet peeves. One of mine is attributing the power of sight to things that don’t have eyes, as in this sentence from the Wall Street Journal: “Restaurant sales are expected to see a warming trend this spring as menu prices rise and consumers spend more.” “To see,” in the Journal sentence, is a lazy solution to a mildly challenging word-order problem, which the writer created and then gave up on. (For that matter, how about using “warming trend” only for weather, if even for that?) One of many possible rewrites: “Economists expect restaurant prices and revenues to rise.”
Usage preferences are preferences, not laws, and I sometimes switch sides. At a health club many years ago, the man on the stair climber next to mine, who knew I was a writer, told me that he despised split infinitives. If I had an opinion about split infinitives at that moment, it was probably that I despised them, too. The man annoyed me, though, so I said, “Oh, I love split infinitives. I use them all the time.” In an article I wrote not long after that, I made sure to use one or two, in case he was checking.
Having herself navigated some unsteady personal terrain, Heisey is making a career out of guiding characters through the kinds of crises we can laugh at and sympathize with all at once, while upending enough rom-com tropes to keep things interesting. All of which is to say that you’re going to get to know Monica Heisey a lot better, in one medium or another, and you’re likely to come out of the experience knowing yourself a little better too.
Broadly speaking, the researchers found two ways to avoid the trade-off between density and green space. Take Singapore, one of the densest countries in the world. There, plants are installed on roofs and facades, turning the familiar gray landscape of skyscrapers and overpasses into a living matrix. By law, developers must replace any natural area that they develop with green space somewhere on the building. Meanwhile, in Curitiba, the largest city in southern Brazil, which has tripled in population since 1970, dense housing is built around dedicated bus lanes and interwoven with large public parks and conservation areas. Curitiba also uses planted areas to help direct and soak up stormwater, buffering residential areas from floods. In Singapore, nature shares space with the built environment, while Curitiba packs people in tightly and then spares land for other species inside the boundaries of the city.
For you souls out there that have always appreciated this king of burgers, well, all you have to do is read and enjoy and we can agree that we are kindred spirits separated on the plane of time and space (depending where and when you happen to read this), and we know what a good thing is when we taste one, and the Big Mac is indeed a good thing. In fact, it’s great.
Many people enjoy movies. But people are often surprised that I do, too, because I am legally blind. I don’t watch a film the way a sighted person does, but the experience opens up a whole world for me.
Poetry today is filled with grand yet remarkably cautious writing, big poems that present themselves as hurricanes, but whose courses you know in advance, and whose winds dissipate only moments after being summoned. In the face of this, how remarkable to produce writing with the intransigent sturdiness of a pebble, a stone you might put in your pocket for comfort or for no reason at all. You should do so; I recommend it to you.
An oral history of Cambodian music, as told by those who survived the Khmer Rouge regime—90% of musicians may have perished—it is also an affecting memoir and travelogue.
I am writing this on a strip of white birch bark
that I cut from a tree with a penknife.
There is no other way to express adequately
the immensity of the clouds that are passing over the farms